Ram Vilas Paswan, the ‘Mausam Vaigyanik’, knew his time was up

Union minister Ram Vilas Paswan, one of the most prominent Dalit leaders of the country, died on Thursday at the age of 74, his son Chirag Paswan said.

The Lok Janshakti Party founder and Minister for Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution was admitted to a private hospital here for several weeks and had recently undergone a heart operation.

Paswan - The political ‘Mausam Vaigyanik’

Three months before the 2009 Lok Sabha election, the then Union Minister, Ram Vilas Paswan called up RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadav and told him to give a few more Lok Sabha seats to the angry Congress in Bihar “or else, we will be out of the UPA”.

Lalu, the then Union Railway Minister in the UPA-I and adept at knowing the pulse of the people, paid no heed to his Cabinet colleague. When the results of the Lok Sabha poll were announced in May 2009, Lalu’s RJD was decimated while Paswan, the LJP chief, himself lost from his fiefdom Hajipur. The Congress, as predicted by Paswan, rode to power for the second consecutive term.

Read: Union Minister and LJP leader Ram Vilas Paswan passes away

Since then, Lalu started calling Paswan a ‘Mausam Vaigyanik’ (a weather scientist) who could read well in advance which way the political wind was blowing. Lalu also conceded in private that not heeding to the sane suggestion of Paswan was one of the biggest political blunders of his life as he was not only ‘shunted’ out of the UPA, he was also jailed in 2013.

But Paswan, true to his nomenclature as Mausam Vaigyanik, changed colours in 2014 and crossed over the fence (to NDA) for greener pastures. He and his son Chirag Paswan were among the six LJP MPs who romped home in the Modi wave of 2014.

Paswan was invited to join the Narendra Modi Government as the Food and Civil Supplies Minister. It was a record of sorts again, as Paswan was the only Union Minister who had served under six Prime Ministers. (For the record, since December 1989, Paswan has served under V P Singh, Deve Gowda, IK Gujral, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh before joining the Narendra Modi Government).

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Born in Bihar’s Khagaria district in July 1946, Paswan wanted to be a police officer and had cleared the examination for DSP. But eventually became a legislator in 1969 (amid row over his age).

But he hogged the nation’s limelight when his name was entered into the Guinness Book of World Records for winning from Hajipur reserved constituency with a record margin in 1977. That record was later broken by Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao when he won a Lok Sabha bypoll from the undivided Andhra Pradesh in 1991.

A prominent Dalit leader, who had friends across the political spectrum, Paswan had been a parliamentarian since 1977, barring two terms 1984-89 and 2009-14.

In 2019, he made two decisions: One, he will not contest Lok Sabha poll (and, therefore, became a Rajya Sabha member from Bihar) and second, he passed on the baton to his only son Chirag who took over as the LJP president from his father in November 2019. The ‘Mausam Vaigyanik’ might not have said it in so many words but he knew his time was up.